Installing VMware Photon

Jul 6, 2016 • Jonathan Frappier

Photon is a minimal operating system designed to run containers (for example using Docker). You can learn more about Photon from the offical GitHub project page

In this post, I will review the steps used to install Photon OS. In my case, I will be installing as a VM in Workstation. Once you have downloaded the ISO, create a VM (Workstation 12 has a Photon OS type available) and mount the ISO

Once powered on, you will see the installation splash screen

Press enter to start the installation and accept the license agreement. I accepted the default 8GB partition, so I have only a single option available to install the OS.

Confirm you want to erase the disk and select the installation type, in my case I am going with minimal. The full installation includes utilities to create and publish containers, while the minimal provides the necessary packages to run and manage containers.

Select your install type, provide a hostname, and root password; the installation will now begin.

Once complete, press a key to restart the VM. Once restarted, you can log into your VM and explore the OS.

For example, to start start docker you will need to start and enable docker

systemctl start docker && systemctl enable docker

Now you could start a Docker container from Dockers public registry - hub.docker.com, the old standby seems to be running NGINX

docker run -d -p 8080:80 nginx

This will download, specifically do a docker pull on the image, and run it.

Once the pull completes, you can run the <pre>docker ps</pre> command to see that it is running

As well as view the running instance on the port specified in the docker run command, in this case 8080.

Last week I had the privilige to keynote the annual Virtualization Technology User Group (VTUG) Spring Forward meetup. My topic was Ansible, with a goal of helping people be comfortable enough to write and run their first playbook.

I have long maintained that Ansible’s documentation is some of the best, if not best out there. However it is impossible to cover every single corner case in documentation which brings me to setting up Ansible to manage Windows, and authenticate via WinRM using Kerberos.